Afghan Peace Could Herald War of Sexes

By HENRY KAMM, Special to the New York Times

Published: December 12, 1988

KABUL, Afghanistan, Dec. 9—
Masooma Esmatee Wardak said that as a woman she was not afraid of the day when the Islamic conservatives who are now in exile in Pakistan or Iran come back to Afghanistan.

''It will be difficult,'' she said, and added, ''for both sides.''

Mrs. Wardak is president of the Women's Council of Afghanistan. Once a Communist group, the women's branch of the ruling People's Democratic Party, the organization has been broadened under the present policy of ''national reconciliation.'' The regime of President Najibullah proclaimed this policy last year as part of its efforts to obtain a political compromise to end the war that would salvage a Communist role.

To her surprise, Mrs. Wardak was invited to head the new women's organization, replacing a woman who was a military officer. The 58-year-old geographer and writer is not a Communist.

In fact, her husband, an American-educated physicist, was jailed for five months when the Communists seized power in 1979 because he had been a Cabinet minister in the old regime.

''My brother was also in jail, but now he is in California,'' she added matter of factly. ''He cannot do anything because they beat him too much. They have broken his morale, so he is there. Sometimes he is at home, sometimes he is in the hospital.'' An Authentic Feminist

Mrs. Wardak was clearly chosen, despite her old-regime background and her many relatives, including a son, in the West, because she is an authentic feminist. One of the first female members of Parliament under the monarchy, which was overthrown in 1973, she was also among the first women to hold responsible government posts. She joined the Education Ministry in 1959.

Mrs. Wardak shares a concern felt by women of modern ways among the more than three million Afghan refugees in Pakistan. They fear that fundamentalist mullahs, or religious leaders, among the seven parties of the resistance alliance based in Peshawar want to turn back the clock on women's rights when they return to leading positions in this country. Mullahs have imposed strict confinement to the house or tent on the vast majority of refugee women and girls and severely limited their access to medical care and education provided by international agencies.

''I am quite optimistic,'' Mrs. Wardak said, in English that she learned largely during a year of study in 1958 at the National College of Education in Evanston, Ill. ''If the situation goes backward, we will fight for it. We can fight with the mullahs through the holy Koran.

''If you can find some place in the Koran for me where it is written that the woman cannot go out, O.K., I'll stay home. But there is no such place there.'' The 'Mourningful' Women

But Mrs. Wardak fears that equality for women is likely to take a significant step backward toward polygamy when the war ends. She said the practice that allows Muslim men to take four wives had been eliminated even before the Communist revolution. But she said that with the great number of war widows and an Afghan tradition obliging men to marry their brothers' widows, the practice would spread again.

''The Afghan women, they have suffered very much from this crazy war,'' Mrs. Wardak said. ''They have lost their husbands, they have lost their sons. In the provinces, they have lost their houses, all equipment, everything that they had. So when you see them, some of them, they are very much mourningful.''

So vivid was Mrs. Wardak's evocation of suffering that the word she had coined seemed to justify itself.

At the same time, she said, women have steadily gained in equality since 1959, when, as she said, ''we were unveiled.'' About 270,000 women today have what she called ''outdoor jobs.'' By this she meant women who have left confinement to their homes to go to work in offices and factories.

''Eighty percent of the other women are in the country, working in the fields,'' she continued. ''So there are left only a few women whose families are quiet prejudiced and don't let them work.'' Women's Working Power

Mrs. Wardak believes that the working power of women will be the main force against turning back the clock, no matter how much fundamentalists might want to do so.

''I know many, many women, thousands of women, who have lost their husbands,'' she said. ''They are working. Who is going to pay for their lives? I think it's no more so very easy to push the women to stay in their houses.''

Mrs. Wardak referred to her own experience. ''When I went to the United States, I was covered,'' she said. ''I had the chador with me when I went in the plane. I took it off and gave it to somebody to take home. But when I came back from the States, I was sitting in the plane until they brought it for me. I put it back on.''

But the next year, she said, women were freed from the veil. ''I can tell you that I will never put on again the chador,'' she said with feeling. ''No, we'll fight for it. I don't want to be told again to stay at home.''

Mrs. Wardak reiterated her optimism that women's rights would prevail in a new, postwar Afghanistan.

''It takes a long time to enlighten the men,'' she said. ''But the next Afghanistan will come. It will come with new hopes.''